


Arachnophobia

by empty_battlefield



Series: A Slice of Sadstuck [8]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Anxiety, Arachnophobia, Balcony Scene, Child Neglect, Giant Spiders, Human Tavros Nitram, Human Vriska, Humanstuck, Other, POV Vriska Serket, Paralysis, Phobias, Romeo and Juliet References, School Play, Single Parents, Spiders, Tavros in a Wheelchair, tavros accident
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-05
Updated: 2017-03-05
Packaged: 2018-09-28 07:28:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10079498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/empty_battlefield/pseuds/empty_battlefield
Summary: Vriska details the worst mistake of her life--the high school accident in which she stupidly put one of her only friends in a wheelchair.Humanstuck High School AU.





	

**Author's Note:**

> All kids Vriska's age are 13-14, freshman year of high school.  
> "Tech" refers to stage crew of the school play, so set building, prop making, stage management, etc.

"You've got to be kidding me. You always do this!"

You are Vriska Serket, and you are on the phone with your mother. Your mother, who has drowned herself in alcohol ONCE AGAIN, and cannot drive you home from tech practice. You don't have to ask why she decided to drink before having to pick her up, but she gives you her excuse ANYWAY. It sounds something like, "bitch, bitch, work is hard and being a mom is hard and nobody understands, bluh, bluh." Before your father died and your mom turned herself into a BOOZEHOUND, she was a force to be reckoned with, who never would find herself wallowing in an ounce of SELF PITY.

Well—things are different now. Somewhere through her tirade of excuses, you hang up the phone. You don't need to hear them. 

You are backstage in your school auditorium. Your best friend convinced you to join the school play, ROMEO AND JULIET, and you did in order to spend more time away from the house. You tried out for the LEAD ROLE, but it went to FEFERI PEIXES instead of you. You decide that you never wanted to KISS Sollux Captor ON THE LIPS anyway, and you pretend you are glad that it is Feferi's job. In a childish act, you decide that the directors don't know a good thing when they see it—and you joined the STAGE CREW instead. This is where TEREZI is—but because she has been a part of stage crew longer than you have, she is friends with EVERYONE and you are friends with NO ONE.

Almost. You do have ONE FRIEND. 

Tavros Nitram is leaning awkwardly against the wall. You spot him when you get off the phone with your mother. "Jesus, Tav, do you have to be so nosy? God."

He just looks with pitiful eyes that were reserved for you on far too many occasions. He asks quietly, "Are we driving you home again?"

"Whatever, if you want to," you say irritably. Tavros pulls out his phone and begins texting his brother, Rufioh.

Rufioh doesn't like you very much, mainly because you are CRUDE and VULGAR. But then again, most PEOPLE don't like you very much—ADULTS or OTHERWISE.

You and he stand outside in the brisk night air, waiting for Rufioh's car to pull into the school lot. _Silence._ Tavros breaks it by asking, "What time is it?" You respond by brightening up the lock screen of your phone and showing it to him. 

Your lock screen is a WHITE WILLOW SPIDER. This prompts Tavros to FREAK OUT.

He cringes and squints his eyes shut, begging you to put it away. This makes you laugh. "Relax, Tavros. It's just a picture. Don't flip out," you say. 

"It's _creepy_ ," he tells you. As if you don't already know. "What kind of weirdo has a spider set as their lock screen?"

"It's a white willow spider," you correct. "They're _supposed_ to mean that your dead loves ones are crossing over. And they eat their mates after sex," you inform him.

You think you included that last part to PISS HIM OFF.

"I don't care," he says. He is still covering his eyes. "I'm not looking till you put it away."

"Bluh, fine," you say, stowing your phone back in your pocket. Even though your spider is gone, Tavros still won't look at you. "Look, I'm sorry—I was just joking," you say almost gently. 

"It's fine," he replies just as Rufioh's car pulls up. 

When you get HOME your mother is SLIGHTLY BUZZED. 

She is asking who drove you home. "Wouldn't you like to know," you scoff at her, already heading towards your bedroom. 

"Sweetie, you really should clean your room," your mother slurs. "There's clothes _everywhere_..."

"Maybe I wouldn't have to put clothes everywhere if you would get my damn closet cleaned out!!" you yell back at her. 

You slam the door for DRAMATIC EFFECT.

You rip open your lunch box and remove half a sandwich from lunch. You yank open the sliding door to your closet, being sure not to let any escape. 

The floor of your CLOSET is crawling with SPIDERS. 

They have, for a while now, been your pesky roommates—high maintenance and very needy. Your mom says they can't scrape up the money for pest control to remove them—and bluh, bluh, pity, pity, _she works hard enough_. Your mother tells you that they aren't poisonous anyway. And that killing a spider is bad luck. 

Originally you thought that was a load of bullshit. You couldn't handle any more bad luck than what you already had, so your closet became Hotel Arachnoid, and you removed all your clothes from your closet. This is why they lay in drawers or hanging off of window sills. 

You take what your PARENTS gave you, and you make out OKAY.

Spiders aren't scary. The ones in your closet don't even bite. You just don't understand Tavros' fear of them—well, you do. The snooty girl Rose says it's called arachnophobia. _Fear of spiders._

Tavros and his neighbor once found a spider nest when they were children. The girl wanted to explore some cave, and insisted that Tavros just hop over the nest and keep on spelunking with her or whatever. Apparently she made him crawl over it, despite him not wanting to. The little spiders ended up underneath the girl's shirt—they bit her bad, and Tavros had to carry her back out the cave, swatting as the larger spiders tried to get at his legs. The girl had passed out by the time they got to the house, and she had to be taken to the hospital. Nowadays, Tavros avoids them at all costs, and flips out whenever he hears about one.

When Tavros originally told you this, you asked him vehemently why he tried to kill the larger spiders—you pried him for details about what the spiders looked like, trying to determine if he was cursed with bad luck or not. He was not pleased with you that day. 

You choose to take your spiders and JUST DEAL WITH THEM. It's not like you can eradicate every single one of them off the face of the earth. They're there. TAVROS, you suppose, did not understand this fact of life. 

You toss the half of your sandwich to them, and you watch as they swarm around it.

You obviously can't house ALL OF THEM. The SPIDERS that get to the sandwich first have DIBS on it. It's only fair. You don't usually have to clean up all the dead spiders, because the strong ones will eat the weak ones. 

You feel bad for the weak ones—most of them are babies. 

But it is only FAIR.

You watch as this occurs. A mother eats another spider's babies so that there is more food for her own brood. Spiders aren't stupid.

None of them want to be weak. NOBODY wants to be weak. You are resolute on that fact.

The next tech rehearsal, you are sitting on the edge of Juliet's half-finished balcony with Tavros, eating dinner. Well, he is eating, but you are not. Your lunch box does not contain your usual sandwich. 

He had to face his fear. You didn't want him to be weak. 

"Hey Tavros."

He turns towards you as you open up your lunch box. In it contains a BABY WHITE SPIDER. This causes Tavros to PANIC. 

"He doesn't bite," you say gently, and you let the spindly creature crawl up and down your arm to prove it. You don't particularly like the feeling of having their prickly legs dig into your skin. But you like the thought of braving it for his sake. 

It never really MATTERED if you liked it or not anyway. 

Meanwhile, Tavros is petrified. His dark face goes ashen, and you can hear his rapid breathing even above the other kid's drills grinding in the distance. "Get it away from me, Vriska," he gasps. "Please, it's, it's—disgusting..."

TAVROS is in the middle of a FULL FLEDGED PANIC ATTACK. But you are not AWARE of it at this time.

"I found him in my closet the other day," you say gently. "He's a baby. Just hatched." You extended your hand a little toward him as the baby spider crawled down your fingers. It is nowhere near him, but he scrambles to the edge of the balcony, away from you and the tiny white spider on your arm. 

"They're good, Tavros," you say to him, losing your patience a little. "White spiders mean a lost loved one is crossing over—"

"I don't care, Vriska, get it away!" he yells at you. You've almost never in your life heard Tavros yell, but he is wide eyed and petrified and of a totally different demeanor. 

His insistent disgust makes you angry. "You're a pansy," you tell him, rage flushing into your face. "I have spiders in my house too, you know. And I don't like them, but they aren't going anywhere, Tavros. You can't just wish them away, alright? You have to deal with them."

It all happens in ONE FLUID MOTION. You grasp his WRIST with one hand—he tries to yank himself away from YOU—he escapes your GRIP, toppling backward and off the side of the BALCONY.

You peer over the ledge he fell off of, and you see his figure lying on his back. Everyone is staring now, and people are crowding around Tavros to see if he's hurt. 

HE is. 

Then people look up at the balcony he fell from and they see YOU. 

You quickly tumble down the wooden stairs on the back of the set and join the group of people who have now crowded around Tavros' supine figure. 

Why doesn't he GET UP?

People are saying that he can't. Someone has called an ambulance, and tech rehearsal has already been cancelled. You catch a glimpse of Tavros over the heads of some short people. His white knuckles are clenched and his face screwed up in pain. But his waist, and everything below it—is limp and still. 

You walk out of the THEATER after the AMBULANCE loaded Tavros into the back. You walk towards HOME and don't look back.

You just couldn't.

Tavros was ABSENT from school for EIGHT DAYS. When he returned, he did so in a WHEELCHAIR.

His neighbor, ARADIA, helped to carry his bags for the first week.

Because of this, you only got a chance to talk to him a few weeks after. You peer at him from down the hall as he is at his locker. He gets extra time between classes, because now it takes him longer to load stuff into the backpack he keeps hanging off the handles of his wheelchair. You take a breath and approach him. 

"Hi," you say, leaning on the lockers and picking at the lamination on your hall pass.

"Hey," he says without looking up. He is picking out the books he needs with fingerless-gloved hands and piling them on his lap.

"Are you coming to tech today?"

"Quit tech," he said curtly.

"Why?" you exclaim. "There's only three weeks left until the show. No use in quitting now."

"They don't have a ramp on stage," he explained, deadpan. "Wouldn't be of much use there, right?"

"—Right," you say, looking down at his brown sandals, which were resting each on their own little platform. You knew that in a few months, his legs would be skinnier than your _arms._ "I'm really sorry—that this whole thing happened to you."

"Don't be." He still isn't looking you in the eye. "Not your fault."

"But—aren't you mad?"

" _I'm not mad_ ," he says a little more forcefully. 

"Oh," you say. You expected him to yell at you, but he didn't. "Well, I just wanted to make _sure_ , since I was only trying to help you, and I had no idea that it was going to happen like that, it was an accident, with the spider and all—"

"Vriska, I don't want to talk about it, okay?" he says, irritated. "It's done with. The damage is permanent. I just gotta deal with it now," he says, as if he had rehearsed the words in front of the mirror.

"So...do you need any help with anything?" you ask earnestly, "I could help you carry your books, or push you to your next class, or—"

"No, don't," he cuts her off, which pisses you off a little. "I can push myself, and Aradia's supposed to come in a few minutes to help me with my stuff."

"Geez, you don't have to be so salty about it," you mumble, just as Aradia shows up. 

She eyes you suspiciously—she was at rehearsal that day, so she saw the whole thing. She probably blamed you for the accident. 

"You ready?" she asks, adjusting her bag on her shoulder. 

"Yeah, one second," he says. He tries to put a notebook in his pack, and the textbooks in his lap spill all over the floor near his feet. 

Aradia drops to the floor to pick them up. You remain standing, just watching them, not helping. She shoves them back into his locker, then you watch the two of them leave the hall together. She eventually takes to pushing his chair, before he turns a corner and disappears. 

That is when you decide that TAVROS is a PANSY, and doesn’t even deserve your TIME. You say fewer WORDS to TAVROS in the next four years than you did to him just then. And people say fewer WORDS to YOU on a general scale, from then on until you GRADUATE. You are never PUNISHED for the incident, since you never touched Tavros. But it isn’t like people don’t know that you were RESPONSIBLE. You think it is probably ARADIA and TEREZI who spread that RUMOR. Well—it isn't really a rumor.

Within a WEEK, people already start CROSSING OVER TO THE OPPOSITE SIDE OF THE HALL when you walk past. In your lab classes, nearly all your LAB PARTNERS refuse to look you in the EYE. 

All because you tried to HELP A GUY OUT. You know now that the ONLY PERSON who will appreciate your HELP is your OWN DAMN SELF. 

People just don't know a good thing when they see it, you decide.

You have you, and that is ENOUGH.

**Author's Note:**

> All comments and thoughts on this story are well appreciated!
> 
> I want to know what you think of this (no pun intended) quirky writing style...is it fitting for the different parts of Vriska's character, or is it just annoying to read? I dunno, was trying a new thing and wanted to see if it worked.


End file.
